


The Last Word

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Apocafic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:48:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And by their names you shall call them.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Word

Scriptures say that there is no harbor left for those who would defy heaven on the last day.

 

Women gnash their teeth and tear their hair, clothes streaming with ashes and blood, cheeks caked with crying, keen the annihilation like a winnowing wind.

 

Infants with the mark of death upon them writhe in their bloody cradles and scream, too.

 

Men kill and die for a cause they cannot fully know.

 

Shadows move on the battlefield, gathering the souls of the dead, wrenching them from those who would cling, moaning, to their last sight of the burning sky.

 

No one who survives will speak of it.

 

The straggling army of man makes its indifferent way on the plains where cities once stood.  The air, rank with sulfur and the stench of death, clings in their throats and makes them cough.

 

Their feet, hidden by the miasma of burning and the mucky blood of millions dead, crush skulls to powder that coats their boots and their tattered pants and their broken faces.

 

Some wonder why they try at all.  Some succumb, sinking to the ground to be trampled into dust later by the men who will not yield.

 

Two among the few thousand left tread softly the crackling ground and pay homage to the fallen not with words or deeds but by their eyes, counting, naming, making free the trapped spirits, too confused by destruction to flutter free of their rotting remnants.

 

The reapers give them wide berth, these two, with the mark of great power carved into their bones and their eyes arcing twin beams of divine light.

 

When they find the living, they shutter their glares, let mirrors cast back to survivors the horrid reflection of what man has become.  Their hands do quick work of providing, and word spreads—for what has man left but words with which to build—of the brothers who make miracles but never smile.

 

It is not the labor of seven days.

 

Years carry their names ahead of them.

 

Some say they are abominations left to eternal penance on the mortal plane.

 

Some say they are love incarnate, God’s last gift to a world he gave up.

 

Some say they are angels.  These are the mad, whose eyes see past the shades of the brothers’ eyes to the souls that blister the air behind the glass.

 

But the brothers say nothing.

 

None are left to see their rare rest, when, in the uncertain bower of a toppled wall or beneath the rusted wreck of an overturned car, they lie down together and let their eyes close so that they may look with inner eye upon each the other, seeing in him his own grace, feeling beneath hands that only now tremble the still human remains.

 

The heart that speeds beneath a touch.

 

The sullied flesh that stutters beneath a tongue.

 

The muscle and sinew for now relaxed from its terrible labor, working for this little while at a different effort.

 

If any are near, they might hear, carried on the wind as a distant, cold choir, two ragged throats releasing their burden, letting go of the world but calling out to each other, clinging for an impossible instant to pure joy.

 

Madmen alone weep tears to hear the brothers then.  Wherever those tears fall, green peeks through the dead, grey ground and there is life once more.

 

So they seed the earth who once destroyed it.

 

So they walk their way into legend.

 

So they make for each other only a room of forgetting, where they are once and all brothers and lovers, which has never had anything to do with God or the Devil.

 

As it was written, so shall it be, when the end of all things brings a new beginning.

 

And by their faces, you shall know them.

 

And by their eyes shall you be healed.

 

And by their names shall you call them.

 

In no other names until forever has its end.

 

Amen.


End file.
